The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible eBook

significance and manifested unto men, The Eternal who
loveth righteousness. Thus may it prove with
the child of Judaism. Liberals, who are in such
haste to drop the name of Christ, should pause long
enough to ask themselves the question whether, since
it roots religion in a life of such perfect goodness
that it became to men the manifestation of God, this
sacred name may not in its turn hold the secret of
our progress; whether, from the treasured forces of
the past that it gathers into itself, when the spring
time now setting in shall have fully come, it may
not blossom into the religion of the future? A
civilization should not be cut off from the historic
seed which lies at the roots of its religion, if it
is to grow unto the harvest.

That in this fidelity to the tradition of their race
the religion of the people of Israel was in the vital
processes of growth, through this long period, we
know assuredly from one conclusive fact. Out of
this tedious winter came, suddenly as it seems to
us, a rich and beautiful spring. The epoch of
the great prophets, with a new life of thought and
aspiration, breaks in abruptly on this commingling
of all sorts of religion within the precincts of Jehovahism.
Even in February the sap is softening and warming
in the veins which show no greening on the tips of
the patient trees. Israel was swelling toward
the day that was sure to come, when, lo! the spring!

IV.

The era of the great prophets, before the exile:
B.C. 800-586.

In the southern Pacific, where coral islands are slowly
forming beneath the surface of the sea, he who is
curious to study the process of the making of an island
must send the divers down to bring up broken bits of
coral, snatched from the dark depths in a painful labor.
After the ocean mountain thrusts its top above the
surface of the sea the work of exploration is easy
enough, and we may walk over hard ground as we study
the new formation in the sunlight. Hitherto, in
our desire to learn the secrets of the growth of Israel,
we have been like men peering over the sides of their
tiny boats into the depths of a sea that covers fascinating
mysteries; watching the labors of the adepts who ever
and anon bring up to the light some fresh fragments
of a buried world. In the epoch that we have
now reached Israel’s growing life lifts itself
above the level of tradition, and stands forth as
solid history, on whose firm ground we can study for
ourselves the making of a nation’s religion.

Israel’s literary period opens for us with the
prophets. Literary fragments float up to us from
earlier days, but now, for the first time, we have
whole books about whose date and authorship we are
reasonably certain. The prophets introduced the
literary craft. They wrote out, in their later
years, the substance of the messages which they had
borne the people. These brilliant pages teem
with graphic descriptions of the actual usages, social
and religious, of their age, so that there is no difficulty
in reproducing with fair accuracy the salient features
of the period.